''There is something strangely modern about him. He is very easily turned into English.''

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 1, p. 239, Houghton Mifflin (1906).
Along with his contemporaries, Thoreau mistook a much later Hellenistic collection known as the Anacreontea for the poetry of Anacreon.

''When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet.''

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 1, p. 374, Houghton Mifflin (1906).

''Nature is not made after such a fashion as we would have her. We piously exaggerate her wonders, as the scenery around our home.''

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 1, p. 202, Houghton Mifflin (1906).

''If it were not for the rivers (and he might go round their heads), a squirrel could here travel thus the whole breadth of the country.''

''If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.''

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. "Civil Disobedience," originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, p. 361, Houghton Mifflin (1906).

''I parted from my beloved because there was one thing which I had to tell her. She questioned me. She should have known all by sympathy. That I had to tell her it was the difference between us,the misunderstanding.''

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. Essay on "Love" in letter, September 1852, to Harrison Blake, in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 6, p. 201, Houghton Mifflin (1906).

''I do not believe there are eight hundred human beings on the globe.''